Péter Ujházi [1940, Székesfehérvár] displays a strong artistic attitude and elemental power within his works which cover a wide variety of techniques and genres. He simultaneously continues and rediscovers the principles of figurative painting, while boldly returning to expressive influences. Following his early period associated with the Art Brut movement, strong colours and formal techniques became prominent in his paintings, and he returned to the Nature-oriented expressionism of his master, Aurél Bernáth. In the ‘The Sky in the Countryside’ Ujházi paints all the elements of the picture field with lively brushstrokes, impressionistic gestures within a light composition, made possible by the use of watercolour. The flowing effect of crowds can be felt from the mass scene of the sky populated with planets and luminous celestial bodies. Overall, this creates a universal sense of multiplicity, which dominated his earlier periods of painting. The use of a watercolour technique, with its concentration of colour pigments and water, results in a surrealistic blend of real and fictional existence, in which the grip of reality is loosened. The scene becomes almost ‘liquid’, real images mixed with memories, a meeting of the distant and the recent past, where inner and outer worlds are blurred. The shapes of identifiable reality and the abstract images of once-lived states of existence break the logic of proportion and space. ‘The Sky in the Countryside’ elevates a fragile moment of an ordinary, almost banal scene to mythological significance, through relationships between unidentifiable spheres within the turbulent surface of the watercolour, swirling with colours and shapes.